Tag: work

A year and a half or so ago, I sat on the edge of the couch in the university photography department. Across from me sat my course leader, prodding me for insights into a psyche I was always, for reasons unknown to me even now, reluctant to let him have. But he knew me regardless, and I’d been complaining to him about feeling a certain uncertainty in regards to my creative practice, and after a long period of consideration, he leaned across and said to me, in all seriousness, “you’re culturally under-stimulated mate.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all, so I huffed and dropped my gaze to the stack of digital photography rags on the IKEA-grade coffee table between us. Son of a bitch! I thought to myself, but I knew he was right. He told me to read more books, and I did. To watch more documentaries, see more shows, to do something, and I did. It paid off in time. I graduated with a First. Holla.

And yet, here we are. My last post is something of an embarrassment to me at the moment, but I always crumble to the January Blues, and it’s perhaps the most honest thing that I’ve written here so far. I’ve been reeling around in acute sadness and panic since New Year, not knowing what to do with my life or my future or my money or my time, but you know, February always brings about a sense of clarity and direction for me, and here it is: I’ve been so quick to blame all of this angst on everything around me – my job, this town, the seemingly endless bands of bitter rain that drive me indoors when all I wanna do is ride my bike. But the other day, I sat down and I read back through the first chapter of the late John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and perhaps it’s because it’s such a pinnacle text in photographic education and theory that it sparked something in my head, but those words spoken to me by my course leader last year drifted back into my periphery. Culturally under-stimulated. It’s real fucking apt alright. Might’ve graduated okay, but it seems to me that I haven’t really learned anything concrete. I am chronically under-stimulated, even now, and I ain’t got no one to blame but myself. Shieeet.

Let’s face up to it all for a second: Working full time is a drag, but my job is actually pretty rad. The hours are semi-unreliable I guess, and the pay could be better, but I’m actually doing pretty great financially and professionally. And I’ve been feeling kinda trapped, but I wonder if perhaps my biggest problem is not Stirling itself, but that I live out in the suburbs (and it’s not just the suburbs, it’s the pensioner’s suburbs), and maybe I should move into town. And I’ve been thinking that maybe I should bite the bullet and learn how to drive already. And may-be, I just need to pull my head out, stop moping around, and make some shit again.

I started this blog a few months back because I had this sort of ingrained assumption that moving out and moving away would be hard, and I wanted to document this sort of mid-millennial adulthood that I was about to step into for the first time. And it has been difficult, in exactly all the ways that I’d imagined, but it’s also been nothing like I imagined. I’ve felt lonely, over-worked, bored as fuck, pretty cosy, hideously optimistic about the future, sick to my stomach over the the general state of humanity, constantly confused, utterly terrified, fairly content, and often completely stoked on life; and I’ve documented it all so inadequately. So vaguely. I’ve got so much to learn about writing, and so much to learn about life.

But listen: yesterday, I left my house in the subzeroes at 5.30am to cycle into town. I was working the early, and the only vehicles that passed me on the way were the road gritters. But the night before, I’d really struggled to fall asleep. I was up long after lights-out, thinking – for the first time in a goddamn long time – about photography, and about zines, and about art shows and self-employment, and about books, and about how nothing materialises from anything without effort. And before I set off to work in the morning, running strong on only a couple hours of sleep, I threw my point-and-shoot Mju into my bag, and I spent my afternoon shooting, working through two rolls of film before I’d even really started. And shit, how I’ve struggled and struggled to write things down here, but how easily this is coming to me now.

These vibes followed me into work again today. They followed me on my bike ride around the ‘burbs. They followed me to the Co-op to pick up mushrooms and Onken. I feel alright, and when my pals share things like this on Facebook, I feel even better. I feel inspired and creative, and I’m so over being down about this incredibly privileged life that I’m currently hanging around in. Things are good, man. And for the first time in a goddamn long time, I am totally calm.

An arts graduate with an extreme anxiety in regards to personal finance, it was always a given that I’d walk out of my degree and into an utterly irrelevant job. In fact, it was always the plan – as I told my mother on the phone a few weeks ago, leaning against a railing that overlooked a subterranean dual carriageway in central Stirling, I am a long way off being a writer, an artist, a completely self-sufficient human being. In a hierarchy of needs, creativity cannot be achieved without first satisfying the need for a sense of financial stability; perhaps in some, but certainly not in me. The plan was to make some money by whatever means, and then I could make some art.

So I got a job, and then I got good at it. Really good at it. I was given a small promotion and then offered a transfer. I took both. I like what I do – it’s enough and I’m looking forward to heading north, but as I dug around in my room tonight, looking for the gear that I’m going to take out to a photo shoot in the morning, I realized that …shit, I haven’t actually done anything in months. This is the first time, perhaps since I finished my degree in early June, that I’ve even made serious effort to do anything of the sort.

I mean, how easy it is to forget about it all when you’ve just clocked nine hours at the till and your hands smell permanently of diluted sanitizer. I was going to make books, but now all I make is coffee.

And this sad revelation comes on the back of the sudden discovery that I’m being consciously underpaid for the role that I’ve been asked to take on, the injustice of which stung hard and prompted an inflation of my self-worth to dangerous proportions. “What the hell am I even doing in a place like this?!” I thought to myself as I seethed over the food that I was preparing in the back today. I can take pretty photographs. I can string words together in a coherent and fashionable manner. I can understand the intricacies of our postmodern society and how we got here, so I can do better than…

… than what? Than a full-time job straight out of university? Than the opportunity to move elsewhere and walk straight into work? Than a job that I actually really dig regardless of whether my current boss – who I’ll be leaving in three weeks, mind – wants to pay me appropriately for it or not?

Yeah, whatever.

But I can do better than coming home and crawling into bed to watch episodes of Fargo until my eyes dry up. I can do better than leaving my camera to gather dust under my bed. I can do better than to just contemplate resisting the complacency that I am so critical of others but give in to in equal measure, if not more.

I can do better, but I don’t. Where can I find the boundless inspiration and motivation that I had in the final months of my degree? I’m literally living the dream, following the plan to a tee, but for one hideously important thing.